Sermons Archive

I imagine some of you are familiar with the work of Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, a teacher and an author who passed away in 2022 at the age of 95. Nhat Hanh first came to prominence when he was exiled from Vietnam for his protest against the Vietnam war, his refusal to take a side, his consistent advocacy for peace. In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel peace prize. In his nomination letter, King wrote that he knew of no one more worthy of the award than “this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam.”

About 10 years ago, when I was working at Denver Urban Ministries, a colleague of mine came to me to talk about the possibility of a new church in the Denver Area. If I remember right, she was preparing to approach what was called the New Church Development Committee with a proposal, and she was sort of running the idea by several Pastors she knew to get our thoughts. Her idea was pretty simple, and I liked it. She wanted to build a church around service.

I know it’s not the way things usually go, but when I was a young man, say in my 20s, I was a lot more cynical than I am now. When I started out as a Pastor, I’d already worked in churches for six years. And I’m sad to say it, but in those six years I’d seen plenty of bad behavior in the church. I had no illusions about the moral purity of Pastors, or the political maneuvering and turf wars that go on in the institutional church. I kind of prided myself on being suspicious of power in any form, knowing that the institutional church is vulnerable to being manipulated by abusive, power hungry people like any institution.

This week, I learned that the oldest structure on earth built by human beings, or at least the oldest one that’s been discovered so far, is a fish trap. There’s debate about just how old it actually is, but a lot of the people who study this stuff agree that sometime between 30 thousand and 40 thousand years ago, a group of people living in what we know as the Australian state of New South Wales gathered rocks of various sizes and built a whole bunch of channels and circular pools in the Barwon river. So fish would swim down the river and enter one of these channels They would swim along between the rock walls until they got to a circular pool.

About 40 years ago, I graduated from college with a freshly minted music degree. And in the time honored tradition of music and liberal arts majors, I came back home and moved in with my parents, not having any clue what my next move was going to be. I know this may shock you, but back in those days, people were not beating down doors to hire music majors, you know, like they are today. It was a much less enlightened time than our own. (That was a joke, in case you’re wondering.)

Did you ever think about air? I mean, air is amazing.

The earth is almost 8000 miles in diameter. But according to NASA, space begins at just 62 miles above the earth’s surface. And once we get even four miles above sea level, we can’t breathe. There’s just not enough oxygen up there. So without this thin, almost infinitesimal band of air around our planet that is only 1/2000th of the planet’s diameter, we wouldn’t be here. Even if we could somehow get enough oxygen without air, we’d all die from exposure to gigantic doses of cosmic radiation, because air combines with our planet’s magnetic field to protect us from that.

Imagine you’re outdoors, anywhere you feel good and at peace. Maybe you’re up in the mountains, surrounded by evergreens, walking alongside a little spring. Maybe you’re in the eastern part of the country, in a hardwood forest with lots of undergrowth and ancient rolling hills covered in trees that go for miles. Or maybe you’re a plains person, and you love the wind and the silence and the shortgrass prairie under the big sky.

I love the scripture reading we heard this morning. It’s beautiful, mysterious, poetic, powerful. We started near the end of the story of Jacob, who’s been a liar and a con man his whole life. He’s traveling to meet his brother Esau, who he swindled years ago, and to whom he hasn’t spoken since. He’s terrified of how his brother may respond after all these years, and he has good reason to be. So the night before he meets his brother, he’s camped in the desert. He’s all alone. It’s late at night, centuries before electric lights and well lit cities, in a darkness lit only by stars. There Jacob is attacked by a mysterious stranger, and all night the two of them struggle, neither one willing to stop or surrender.   

Some people have occasionally accused me of procrastination. I don’t know why anyone would think this. I mean, my sermons are usually almost done by 7:00 AM on Sunday. I almost always register for the United Methodist Annual Conference at least three days before it starts. If you work in industry, maybe you’ve heard of “just in time” inventory management, or “short-cycle manufacturing.” See, I figure I’m not procrastinating. I’m practicing “short-cycle planning,” and “just in time scheduling.” This is not a character flaw, or at least that’s what I tell myself. It’s a cutting edge time management practice.

A lot of us here probably remember the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that took place in Iraq in 2004, where detainees were being tortured and held indefinitely without charges under U.S. Military command. The Army’s investigation resulted in 11 convictions of prison guards. Those who were convicted insisted they were following orders from their superiors, but after investigation the commanding officers were never charged.